First, it’s kind of technical — and “word people” sometimes (mistakenly) think that they’re not cut out to understand a bit of code.

Second, it’s had a checkered past. (Hey, who hasn’t.) There have always been cool, ethical, creative SEOs — but there was a time when they were often overshadowed by the mass of weird dudes who called themselves “black hat” and pretended to be some kind of low-level gangster.

But it’s 2018 now, and time to get over outdated ideas about SEO. If you make a living with words, or you want to, you owe it to yourself — and your clients — to gain a reasonable level of SEO literacy.

You’re not going to turn into a highly qualified SEO overnight. But it’s worth taking some time to get comfortable with the basics, so you can have smart conversations with your boss, with clients, with SEO professionals, or just make informed decisions for your own website.

With that in mind, here are a few SEO myths that I still see people buying into. Let’s clear them up and move forward.

Myth #1: The dreaded duplicate content penalty

Any time I talk about SEO, someone asks if it’s okay to republish content on sites like Medium or LinkedIn Pulse. “Will I get hurt by the duplicate content penalty?”

We can put this one to bed: No.

Here’s what Google has to say about it:

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.” – Google webmaster support

Translating that into human, if you’re scraping content that someone else wrote, creating multiple versions of the same page in order to make your site look less pathetic, or using identical content on multiple sites to create an illusion of real links … yeah, that will make Google hate you.

Search engines don’t want to serve three or four copies of the exact same piece of content on the search engine results page (SERP). So, your unique collection of words usually only shows up on one search result — and you normally want that one time to be the version that was published on your own site.

Fortunately, the search engine algorithms are usually smart enough to figure this out. Medium takes the extra step of adding the tag that tells search engines that your original site’s version is the “canonical” one — if you use their tools to publish your content there (as opposed to doing a cut and paste).

If you syndicate your work elsewhere (maybe as a guest post to increase your audience and reach more people), you can also add that canonical tag in. And if you have the same content appearing in multiple places on your own site, you can use the canonical tag to let search engines know which one you want to be considered the “official” version.

It’s a smart practice to publish on your own site first, a few days or even a week before you syndicate it. This gives search engines the chance to index it before they see it pop up on other sites.

It’s also always a good idea to include relevant links back to your own content. After all, the entire point of syndication is to attract a larger audience to your main gig.

Repurposing content is such a valuable way to increase your content’s effectiveness. Don’t shy away from it because you’re worried about duplicate content.

Myth #2: SEO is about stuffing your work with keywords

You’ll see this sometimes from people (too often clients) who want you to “SEO” a piece of content.

People with an outdated understanding of SEO think this means jamming a bunch of regrettable nonsense into your lovely words. They might overuse a keyword (potentially to the point of gibberish), or even try to play some kind of silly trick like cramming a bunch of keywords in white text on a white background.

Now, keywords matter for SEO, because keywords matter to human beings. Keywords are just the strings of words people use to find out more about your topic.

So they do matter, and it’s smart to figure out what kinds of phrases people use when they think about what you publish.

But if they’re stuffed into your content to the point where they become distracting to human readers, you’re definitely doing it wrong.

Use clear, specific language when you write about your topic. It helps search engines understand what you’re writing, but — much more importantly — it helps human beings (you know, the ones you’re trying to do business with) understand what you do.

Wondering if it’s still okay to use metaphors, analogies, storytelling, and pop culture references? A single question will give you the answer:

Myth #3: Content has to contain (insert arbitrary number here) words to work for SEO

Don’t get so caught up in specific character counts that you miss the key point: Make your content useful and interesting.

Thin, lightweight content isn’t useful.

Overly long, rambling content isn’t interesting.

Write intelligently and thoroughly about your topic, while making a point with each piece of content, and linking them together in a logical way so your audience can follow your ideas from one piece to another.

You’d probably do these things whether or not SEO mattered to you. And that tends to be a wise way to approach your SEO strategy.

The Big SEO Myth

There’s a major misunderstanding that underlies all of these small ones: that you have to prioritize SEO over your audience in order to get good results on the SERPs.

If you’re doing dumb things because you think Google wants you to, stop immediately. There are times when the smartest thing you can do for your SEO is to ignore Google — at least for some of your content.

But there’s a whole world of best practices that can make key pieces of your content more accessible to the millions of people who use search engines to find what they want.

Content strategy (for search or anything else) should never be about selling your soul or dumbing down your work. Good content strategy is about getting incredibly clear on what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters — then communicating that effectively.

Need a little help with that?

Search engine optimization isn’t a favorite topic for most writers, and a lot of the education out there isn’t really designed for writers.

And we didn’t think that was fair. 🙂

That’s why we added an in-depth module to our new Creative Content Foundations class — all about essential SEO tools and techniques specifically for creative professionals.

Sonia Simone

Sonia Simone is co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Copyblogger. She writes about content marketing strategy here, and about creativity, the craft of writing, and creative productivity at Remarkable Communication. If you like audio content, you can hear Sonia's takes on marketing and business on the Copyblogger FM podcast.

Sure, but if you have great distribution on crap, you just get the word out faster about how crappy you are. Which can work (clickbait), but we’re not the ones to teach people how to make it work, because we find it grim and depressing.

We never recommend that a content creator ignore promoting and distribution. But it can’t be either/or. You need them both.

Great post, Sonia, and I loved the The Big SEO Myth! There’s a common misconception that being search optimized and providing original, reader-focused content are mutually exclusive. Nothing is further from the truth!

Google is all about relevance to the searcher. It looks for great content that is original, helpful and answers questions. It’s not about keyword stuffing and robotic, unoriginal writing. For the content writer, it should be about providing reader value, writing in terms the reader understands (and would search for) and then giving some thought to good web and search formatting. It doesn’t hinder great and original content writing in any way. Thanks for addressing that.

Often the penalties Google enacts for high volume scammers spooks white hat good guys into over-policing (and over-thinking) their own work.

And even some of the SEO best practices everyone agrees on are unnecessary for 90% of us.

For example, keyword research is for SEO professionals working for clients, because we don’t know the high intent questions a prospect will ask. But the business owner, or sales guy – they know in their bones which objections or interests an article should touch on.

SEO just means making it easy to know what you’re writing about instead of waiting for someone to find brilliant scraps of paper in your pockets and dubbing you the next Emily Dickinson. Be easy for humans to find and comprehend, and Google’s gotten good enough to rank you accordingly. It’s so much easier this way, too.

A timely article Sonia 🙂 I often get asked by copywriters “how much SEO” they should focus on, I always tell them “none”. Just tell a great, robust story about the subject… and if there is any SEO work to be done, I can tweak the content later 🙂
*thanks for sharing your post Sonia 🙂

I actually love the fact that the evolution of the algorithms means that your biggest job as a content writer using SEO is to, you know, write good quality content that people actually want to read and will find useful. Google’s goal – to serve quality content – is actually pretty well aligned with the goal of content writers – to produce useful stuff. Hooray!

Great topic to talk about. I think sometimes bloggers and writers can get too lost in the SEO game and forget what actually matters; genuinely helping the people in the niche.

Now, we have Google RankBrain, which is an AI, and with this new algorithm factor keywords and backlinks are no longer so important in order to rank high in the SERPS.

What’s more important to remember is that if you want Google to rank your content high you should take great care of their number one priority and that is their Searcher, their User. Google would not be as successful today if it wasn’t for the people using their tool. Take great care of these people and Google will take great care of you, 😉

Hi Sonia,
This has been proved very useful; thank you for posting! We have been postings blog posts on nutrition for some time but didn’t really take into consideration the relevant practices and optimising it for SEO. We only wanted our content to be useful for our readers. Well now we have to make sure that is also optimised for the search engines. Thanks again

SEO is all about good habits, once you are used to following those habits it’s second nature to apply them when writing content either for yourself or for others. Eventually it gets to the point when you’d have to decide not to follow your best practices for it not to happen when writing!

Writing for your audience (as mentioned) is the most important thing, then you can go through and link to anything that’s relevant in the copy.

Dear Sonia, thank you very much for sharing this great piece of information with us. I have always worried about google penalties. Especially the duplicate content. So I’m being careful. It was a relief to see your tips.